History 450 - Sex Law Colonial Amer

[US/p] An exploration of life in colonial North America through laws passed to regulate, restrict, and give meaning to sexual relations by British, Spanish, French, and Dutch colonizers. Major themes will be sexual and gender norms, faith and family, economic systems, geography, and culture with an emphasis on cross-cultural conflicts, interactions, and communities. Students will work extensively with primary source documents from court cases about interracial sex, premarital sex, sexual assault, abortion, same-sex intimacies, bastardy, and people of indeterminate sex and gender. Students will write an original research paper. One class meeting per week. Limited to 15 students. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Manion.